Marcus White Living Room Presentations

Widows Rule in Chaucer,s Troilus and Cruseyde- Denise Bellmore Steele spoke to us about her papr. In her paper she spoke about how in chaucer,s Trolius and Criseyede widows were treated as if they are evil. In the medieval ages widows were looked down upon. If you were a widow, there is no second chance at marriage, the woman is supposed to continue her life alone. Denise's presentation was done fairly well except that she did not speak clear enough for me to fully understand what she was talking about. The basic thing she wanted to get across in her paper was how widows were treated in the Medieval ages compared with Chaucers piece, either how they differ or compare.

Twitter- A special studies major student here at CCSU by the name of Alex presented a new way of using the internet and applying literature to it. He is taking a class called Digital Literary Studies. He explained how he was working on this thing called twitter, which compares with the status updates on facebook. It is the same concept except, a person takes these little status updates and forms poetry out of them. Alex makes sure we know that there are many things a person can do with these little short words of human experience. There is a website that uses twitter and not only can a person form poems out of these words but, a person can add weird music and picking random pictures. The pictures and words can be taken off of some random person's facebook page or any other interactive website of the same type and the music is created digitally to fit the picture and words. Alex believes that there are more things to do on the internet and we should take advantage of the cool things we can do. He is thinking about writing a book using twitter but, it will be very hard because, he is taking peoples words right from their facebook pages.

Unspeakable Words Spoken: Toni Morrison , Literature Censorship and the Modern American Classroom- Sharon Kenniston worte her thesis about the censorship in the high school classroom when it came to literature. Toni Morrison's "Beloved" is still not permisable to read in the high school classroom because of its adult content. In Sharon's paper, she says that it is not right to ban great pieces of literature just because it has violence in it or adult content. By the high school level they should be exposed to things like this and react thoughfully about the events they just have read. Some people are against having violent books or things of that sort brought into a high school english class but sharon argues that some people actually are for it. Some teachers want their students to reflect thoughtfully about the scenes in the book and they want the students to be more accepting of people that are different then them. Teachers want to promote reading, not just for school but lifetime readers. By reading a book like the "Beloved" students will have a better english experience and will learn a lot about life and struggle.

Executive Boards- Margrat, a Political Science major wrote a thesis about the use of exuecutive boards and if they should be allowed. I did not really understand her presentation. She was not a well spoken person and she seemed kind of shy in fron of the audience. I did however, learn that there are these things called Executive Boards and they are policies of action that if the president signs becomes law. Margrat wanted to inform us that even though we live in a democracy there are still some dictatorship charactaristics to how things are run or some laws are passed. Goerge Bush has used many executive boards but, statistically democrats use more of them. Republicans use them as well but, only for popularity and emergency. Executive boards are said to be constitutional which is why presidents are still allowed to use them.

That was the end of the presentations, there was a brief Q&A session, Some of the questions i caught are below.

1- to alex: What do you think are the historical benefits of twitter?

response- I think it is a metaphore for the internet, which is arguably the best form of conversing. I believe robots are coming and everything will be electronic. He continued on a tangent, but he basically wanted us to know that the future is computers and digital works.

2- the second question was unclear to me but, it had something to do with the candidates. She said that the candidates were asked to attend a science debate and no word from them has been heard. Other then that there was no other questions, unless i missed one..but to the best of my knowledge that is all.